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TEN MONTHS IN LIBBY PRISON. 


BY LOUIS PALMA DI CESNOLA, 

LATE COLONEL 4th N. Y. CAVALRY. 


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Colonel Cesnola is a Sardinian of noble 
family, and was educated in the best mili¬ 
tary schools of Europe, having been placed 
in that at Paris when only nine years of 
nge. His father was at that time Secretary 
of War under the Sardinian government. 
The son came to this country just before 
the breaking out of the rebellion, and hos¬ 
tilities quickly elicited his enthusiastic in¬ 
terest in the cause of the Union. Having 
had experience in the Crimean war, as a 
member of the staff of the Sardinian Gen¬ 
eral-in-chief, he was well qualified for the 
duties of the field. In September, 1862, 
he took command of the 4th N. Y. cavalry, 
whose superior discipline and many brave 
achievements have gained for it an enviable 
fame. At the battle of Aldie, June, 1863, 
he was commended for his gallant conduct 
by General Kilpatrick, early in the action, 
but afterwards, while far in the advance, he 
was surrounded by superior numbers, and 
taken prisoner. He spent ten months in 
Libby prison. After his exchange he re¬ 
turned to his regiment, and led the brigade 
to which it belonged in many severe en¬ 
gagements previous to its mustering out, in 
September last. 

Soon after entering Libby, the rebel offi¬ 
cer in charge, offered Colonel Cesnola, with 
some other foreigners, better quarters than 
their fellow officers had, which proposal was 
indignantly rejected. “ We are U. S. offi¬ 
cers,” they said. 

I entered the service of the United States 
in October, 1861, and was captured in Vir¬ 
ginia the 17th of June, 1863, at the cavalry 


engagement of Aldie. I was marched, 
mostly on foot, more than one hundred 
miles to Staunton, and thence by railroad 
conveyed to the rebel capital and confined 
in the Libby prison. I arrived in Rich¬ 
mond the 25th of June, at about four 
o’clock in the afternoon, and remained im¬ 
mured in that tobacco factory until the 24th 
of March, 1864, when I was specially ex¬ 
changed for Colonel Brown of the 59th 
Georgia, (-) regiment. 

SEARCHING FOR VALUABLES. 

At my arrival in Libby I was called into 
the office of the commanding officer of that 
military prison, Captain (now Major) Thos. 
P. Turner, and by him, my name, rank, regi¬ 
ment, etc., was registered in his book; the 
walls of Turner’s office were covered with 
captured U. S. colors, regimental battle- 
flags, and cavalry guidons. From that office 
I was ordered into a spacious dark hall, in 
a corner of which, a rebel seargeant searched 
me through from head to foot, in the rough¬ 
est manner possible. He took away from 
me every little trinket I had, my penknife, 
eyeglasses, meerschaum-pipe, matches, and 
a bunch of small keys; and was angry be¬ 
cause he could not find any greenbacks on 
my person. He ordered me to take off my 
boots for inspection; I answered him that I 
always had a servant to perform that ser¬ 
vice for me. He insisted, but I refused 
until he took them off himself, and searched 
them very minutely. He asked me what I 
had done with my money, and if I had any 
watch. I told him that a chivalric Southron 
had stolen my watch and money during the 
march from Middleburg to Staunton. He 
began to abuse me, using very profane lan¬ 
guage and denying my veracity. I told 
him that perhaps the gentleman intended 
only to borrow those articles from me. Cap¬ 
tain Fisher, a signal officer of the Army of 
the Potomac, was punished and kept walk- 




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that is three hundred men. The greatest 
part of the day was lost in going from Rich¬ 
mond to Belle Isle, and returning. Some¬ 
times the boatman was not there to convey 
us to the other side of the James river, and 
mufih precious tinfe was thus lost. I en 
deavored to obtain permission to sleep at 
Belle Isle, in order to be at work early in 
the morning in distributing, as the cold 
weather was terribly felt by our poor men. 
But Major Turner had no power to grant 
this, and having asked General Winder if 
an application to him in writing, signed by 
the Committee of Distribution, would be 
taken into consideration, his brutish answer 
was, u No , certainly not” 

Besides the time lost in going and coming 
back and waiting for the boat, we lost much 
time there also, as the squads when called 
out by us, were sometimes receiving their 
rations; at another they were at roll-call, 
etc. So we could not transact business 
really more than three hours every day, 
which retarded the distribution consider¬ 
ably, while we would have very willingly 
distributed day and night in order to shel¬ 
ter with good warm clothes the thousands 
of half naked bodies, shivering from head 
to foot from cold and hunger. I am a 
soldier by profession since my boyhood ; I 
have been in several wars in Europe; I am 
familiar with death, and have seen it in all 
its different aspects, but my heart has never 
been moved as it was by the condition of 
those men at Belle Isle. Their frozen feet 
wrapped in a piece of blanket or an old 
flannel shirt, in place of the boots which 
were taken away from them by their cap- 
tors, those long, pale, hungry faces, with 
hair and beard uncut for months; a kind of 
perpetual motion given to their bodies by 
the millions of vermin that devoured their 
very flesh ; their emaciated forms, telling at 
first sight how many long and weary, weary 
months they had been there fighting against 
death in the form of scurvy, low fevers, 
diarrhoea, congestion of the lungs, etc.; 
their feeble voices saying, “ Oh ! Colonel, 
do give us something to eat, for God’s 
sake/’ etc. These scenes, I confess, were to 
me heartrending in the extreme. These 
men received at meal time, one bucket of 
broken pieces of corn bread, and one buck¬ 
et of over-boiled sweet potatoes for every 
one hundred men ! I saw it myself many 


times! Indeed, it was so revolting that I 
think even pigs would have sickened at it. 
How the chiefs of squads could divide so 
small a quantity of food in one hundred 
parts has always been for me a problem, 
which I am still unable to solve.; though 
often, while distributing the clothing, some 
men would come to me and complain that 
for whole days they could not get anything 
to eat, because before their turn came the 
bucket was empty! 

It was no wonder if these poor, starved 
human beings would eat rats and dogs. I 
recollect the fact of a rebel officer having 
gone inside the inclosure to visit the prison¬ 
ers, accompanied by a dog. He did not 
miss it until he was coming out; but, alas ! 
it was too late, and by that time he could 
only see one man gnawing with voracity 
his dog’s last bone ! The next day the 
Richmond Enquirer, edited by that Irish 
patriot, John Mitchell, had a leading article 
entitled, “ Dogs eat dogs,” and gave the 
particulars of the affair, summing up by say¬ 
ing that the Yankee prisoners at Belle Isle, 
though furnished with plenty of wholesome 
food, preferred to eat dogs. 

Of these six thousand four hundred and 
thirty-four prisoners, over seven hundred 
were at the time I first visited Belle Isle, 
without tents or any shelter whatever at 
night, lying in ditches, or digging holes in 
the sandy ground in which they slept in a 
bundle, one over the other, and I heard 
that often in the morning those who were 
on the top were found frozen to death, and 
I actually saw men wrapped up in blankets 
brought out of the enclosure who were found 
dead and frozen in ditches outside of the 
tents! 

Upon this subject I had frequent conver¬ 
sations with Lieutenant Bossieux, who told 
me himself he had several times made 
proper requisitions for the necessary tents; 
that he went to see the quartermaster of the 
prison himself (an Ohio renegade, was a 
greater scoundrel than any of the Southren 
race); that they were promised but never 
delivered. He also told m-e he had made a 
plan for barracks which would have cost 
very little and would have accommodated 
our men all comfortably, but that he never 
heard anything more about it, nor of boards 
given for that or any other purpose. After 
having distributed the contents of several 



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boxes, I perceived that the empty boxes 
were, by order of Lieutenant Bossieux piled 
up as if to be used for some purpose. I 
went to see him, and told him I intended 
to give to the men those empty boxes, so 
that they could floor their tents with them. 
He said he had instructions from the quar¬ 
termaster to save all those boxes, that he 
wanted them to pack army clothing in, but 
he would give me in return the boards 
necessary to floor all the tents. I said 
nothing further for three or four days, but 
seeing that the boards were coming only in 
the same manner as the tents so many times 
asked, I took upon myself, at the cost of 
being susperseded for it, not to wait any 
longer, and I distributed them to the men, 
gladdening many hearts. A portion of these 
boxes were used to make coffins for those 
who had ceased to suffer in this wicked 
place. 

PLUNDERING. 

There has been so much said about the 
rebel government stealing half the boxes 
sent to us by the government, and the 
United States Sanitary Commission, that I 
have recalled to my memory all the minu¬ 
test particulars which have reference to 
them, and I have come to the conclusion 
that the largest number of the boxes of 
clothing were turned over to us for distri¬ 
bution, and that they had no official con¬ 
nection with the heavy robberies which we 
have unfortunately sustained, and were un¬ 
able to prevent. 

RICHMOND CITY BATTALIONS. 

It is true that the Richmond City battal¬ 
ions, who guarded the federal prisoners, had 
a large number of their men clothed in U. 
S. uniforms, but'my opinion (I may be 
wrong) is, that the warehouse adjacent to 
the Libby, in which all our boxes were 
stored and guarded by them, was visited at 
night b} T these undisciplined and unprinci¬ 
pled soldiery, who would appropriate to 
themselves and sell to others, all the clothing 
they wanted. I came to this conclusion, 
after I had visited that warehouse several 
times, as I found ragged rebel uniforms left 
here and there in the corners of the ware¬ 
house; showing plainly that some of the 
rebels had made their hasty toilet there. 
When one hundred and nine union officers j 
escaped from the Libby, through the tunnel, 


I had the scurvy and could not join the party. 
The next morning I conversed with some of 
the sentinels, and laughed at their great 
vigilance during the previous night. They 
said that they had seen men coming out 
from the yard of the warehouse, and run¬ 
ning aS fast as they could, but they sup¬ 
posed it toas some of their own guard making 
a raid on our boxes. Several times in the 
stillness of the night, I heard plainly in the 
warehouse the hammering and breaking of 
boxes, but this was the robbers’ midnight 
work, and scarcely chargeable to the rebel 
authorities. The rebel government was, 
however, guilty of the grossest indifference 
as to the safe keeping of our boxes ; of that 
there is no doubt, but I cannot bring my¬ 
self to believe that their authorities were 
officially connected with it. 

The boxes sent from Richmond to Belle 
Isle for immediate distribution, were also 
plundered during the night, even after I 
obtained permission to put some of our own 
men to guard them. Our hungry men, 
tempted by the sentinels with bread and 
pies, would give a portion of the clothing 
issued to them, for both or either of them ; 
and, as in all large communities, there were 
amongst our prisoners some rascals who 
would steal the clothing of their sleeping 
comrades and sell them likewise to the guard. 
Colonel Yon Schrader and myself remon¬ 
strated several times to Lieutenant Bossieux, 
and he put several of his men in irons for 
having bought clothing from our prisoners, 
but the evil could not be stopped by us. 

I have often been present at guard mount¬ 
ing in Belle Isle, and remarked the relieved 
party (sometimes half of them) would have 
either U. S. blankets, overcoats or panta¬ 
loons, and the relieving party of that day 
would come off duty the next morning 
similarly supplied with new U. S. clothes. 
These facts, of course, not being generally 
known to our fellow prisoners, and from the 
barred windows of the Libby seeing a very 
large number of the guard dressed in U. S. 
uniforms, they came to the very natural 
conclusion that the rebel government was 
robbing us to clothe their own men. 

The rebel authorities have never given to 
Colonel Boyd or Colonel Yon Schrader or 
myself (that I am aware of,) the invoices 
I which, I suppose both the government and 
1 the U. 3ir r 8anitary Commission must have 



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sent with the goods. I asked Major Turner 
if he had those invoices; he replied he had 
not seen them. I inquired also of Richard • 
Turner in regard to them, but he rudely 
told me that it was not my business. From 
this reason I was unable to find out how 
many boxes were sent to us. 

MAKING SHOES. 

My narrative now soon comes to a close. 
Towards the latter part of November I was 
superseded as Commissary of Distribution 
by order of General J. H. Winder. Two 
causes originated it. The first was this: 
The rebels came one day to Belle Isle, and 
paroled four hundred men to make shoes for 
their army, and intimated that they would 
come again in a few days to parole several 
hundred more for the same object. I deci¬ 
ded at once to do what I considered the 
duty of a U. S. officer, and interfere in this 
matter. I sent for several of the chiefs of 
squads, and told them to inform the men 
that by going to work for the rebels they 
were breaking their oath towards the U. S. 
government, and were helping instead of 
fighting the enemy of their country; that 
they would be all liable to be court-martialed 
for it as soon as they reached our lines, and 
that I considered it my duty to inform them 
of it. These sergeants went at once to see 
their men, and the result was that when the 
rebels came the second time, they could not 
get a single one, and soon they discovered 
the reason of it. 

The second cause for which I was super¬ 
seded is the following. One morning, 
rather earlier than usual, we were ordered 
out of our room for the purpose of having 
it scrubbed by the negroes. The overseer 
who had charge of the negroes (always with 
a stick in his hands), came to the corner 
where I had my quarters, and two buckets 
of water were thrown on the floor by his 
negroes before I was aware of their presence. 
In the haste of leaving the room my friend 
and messmate, Lieutenant Morley, of the 
12th Pennsylvania cavalry, had left a piece 
of ham on the shelf, within reach of any un¬ 


scrupulous hand which chose to take it. I 
called him back and told him to put it out 
of reach, as I was as much afraid of negro 
thieves as of white ones. The overseer, 
whom I had not perceived was behind me, 
heard the remark and applied the meaning 
to himself. To my surprise he put one hand 
on my shoulder and made use of the follow¬ 
ing language: God d—m you, do you 
mean that I am a thief? If a hot iron had 
touched my skin it would not have mad¬ 
dened me more than his insolent touch did. 
I turned myself towards him, and in a second 
I had him by the throat with both my hands, 
down he went on the floor, and I struck him 
many times as hard as I could on his face, 
until my rage was satisfied. The negroes 
were jubilant, and of course nobody inter¬ 
fered to help the overseer. I was called 
down stairs in Major Turner’s office, where 
I explained the whole affair, and though I 
was not punished bodily, my supercedure 
took place on that very morning. 

From November to March, 1864, I was 
not allowed to leave for a single mo¬ 
ment the Libby prison, and when they began 
to parole and send North some officers, all 
all the othei colonels but two were sent 
North before me ; though I had been a pris¬ 
oner longer than any of them. Colonel 
Robert Ould, the rebel Commissioner, to 
whom I was obnoxious, said that he did not 
want to send me North at all, but he would 
keep me in prison as long as he liked; but 
he was nevertheless soon afterwards com¬ 
pelled to send me, as Colonel Jack Brown, 
of the 59th Georgia regiment was sent 
South conditionally, that if he could not 
get me exchanged for him, he was to 
return North and be kept as long as I was 
held by the rebel authorities. 

Loo is Palma di Cesnola, 

Late Colonel 4th N. Y. Cav. 

New York, 13th Feb., 1865. 

City and County of New York, ss. 

Sworn to before me, 

John Rogers, 








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CHIEF JUSTICE CHASE AND THE UNITED 
STATES SANITARY COMMISSION. 

On taking the chair at the annuul meet¬ 
ing of the National Freedman’s Relief Asso¬ 
ciation, held in the hall of the House of 
Representatives, at Washington City, Feb¬ 
ruary 26, 1865, the Chief Justice of the 
United States Supreme Court, Salmon P. 
Chase, referred to the Sanitary Commission 
as follows :— 

This war, cow waged for national unity, 
is marked by peculiar characteristics. The 
praise of our brave army and navv is upon 
all lips. The endurance and pat»otism of 
the heroic people, which has never faltered 
in its resolve to maintain, at whatever cost, 
the integrity of the American republic, fur¬ 
nish to this, and will furnish to all after¬ 
coming generations, objects of wonder and 
topics of eulogy. The vast energies and the 
vast resources which have been called into 
action, puzzle the statesmen and economists 
of the old world and astonish our own. 

Rut these, I think, will not hereafter be 
regarded as the most peculiar characteristics 
of this war. Men of thought, and especially 
men who recognize the providence of Gfod 
in the affairs of men, cannot fail to observe 
that it is distinguished by great charities 
even more than by great achievements. 

What age before this age, and what 
country besides our country, ever witnessed 
such an organization as that of the Sanitary 
Commission ? What needs have been sup¬ 
plied ; what wants relieved; what wounds 
healed; what evils averted, by the activity, 
wisdom, and unflagging zeal of this admira¬ 
ble organization, fostered and sustained by 
the people, and recognized and sided by the 
government. 

DISABLED AND DISCHARGED. 

At a meeting of the Standing Committee 
of the Ucited States Sanitary Commission, 
held February 24, 1865 : 

Resolved , That the United States Sani¬ 
tary Commission, deeply convinced of the 


importance of providing from time to time, 
as its funds will allow, shelter and protection 
for disabled and discharged soldiers, will 
from this date consider itself authorized to 
devote any portion of its funds to this pur¬ 
pose ; and that due notification be made of 
this resolution in the Bulletin, Reporter , 
and its usual advertising mediums. 

J. Foster Jenkins, 0 

• General Secretary. 

No. 823 Broadway, New York. 


IMPORTANT TESTIMONIAL BY QUARTER¬ 
MASTER GENERAL M. C. MEIGS. 

Quarter Master General’s Office, 1 ^ 

Washington, D. C., Feb. 20, 1$65. J 

Dr. J. S. Newberry, 

Sect. Western Dept. U. S. San. Com. 

Dear Sir :— I have received and thank 
you for your Report of 22d October last. 

It is an hdnorable record. I notice particu- ^ 
larly the value of the hospital gardens. Re¬ 
membering the scarcity of all provisions, ex¬ 
cept the substantial parts of the army ration, 
and even of those at the time I met you at / 
Chattanooga in the winter of 1863. I read * 
with gratification the statement of the quan¬ 
tity of esculents which your gardens, estab¬ 
lished the next spring, produced for the 
sufferers in hospital. 

I endeavored while at Chattanooga to 
have arrangements made for cultivation 
during the ensuing spring and summer, but 
found every one too much occupied with the 
sterner work of war to be willing to devote 
time and labor to raising at that warlike 
centre a portion of the supplies which, when 
brought from the distant North, cost so 
much and so much interfered with the 
transportation of men and munitions. 

I hope that these gardens will be coil- . 
tinued, and that the Sanitary Commission, 
which is free from the pressure of the 
sterner duties of the soldiers, will continue 
to give its attention to extending this culti¬ 
vation for their benefit. 

I am very truly and respectfully, 

Your obedient servant, 

M. C. Meigs. 

Quarter-Master General and Brevet Major General. 


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